i haven’t read Marlowe’s take on the controversy and it seems to be a subset of the larger complementarian – egalitarian controversy.

there seems to be good women and men on both sides of this issue. i recently picked up a couple of books to begin to wrap my own brain around it. all of my undergrad and graduate training has been complementarian and most of my church leadership involvement has been in either egalitarian or modified egalitarian contexts! e.g. i helped to interview and hire a female pastor (who reported to me) at Cedar Ridge.

Honestly I have more study to do in this area particularly since I’m raising three daughters!

On the gender-neutral controversy, I don’t think that it’s a big deal if we translate masculine pronouns neutrally when the context makes it clear that it’s truly neutral and the language is available to us in translate to express it. I think it can be a big deal when we translate that way to advance a theological-hermeneutical pre-commitment.

One trick in the larger egalitarian-complementarian conversation is to avoid the scylla of a slavish commitment to political correctness on the one hand and the charybdis of an unthinking adherence to tradition on the other.